Free Dreamland by Sarah Dessen Page B

other groups moved on and off the stage. It was ten in the morning and we’d had a big game the night before. I had a sore back from adjusting to my new position at the midpoint in the pyramid, Rina had a hangover, and Kelly Brandt and Chad had broken up—again—about seven hours earlier. Clearly, we were not at our best.
    â€œI think they hate us,” Rina whispered to me as we did our shimmy-shake number to “My Girl,” with rows and rows of elderly people sitting in folding chairs in front of us. They were watching in a polite, if somewhat bored fashion: Some had their hands over their ears to block out our music. Kelly was sniffling, wiping her eyes during her handspring run, and Melinda Trudale had somehow missed our dance coach’s advice to “tone things down a bit” and was doing her normal gyrating and hip-snapping right up front, much to the horror of a frail woman with an oxygen tank in the front row who was trying to knit some booties.
    â€œI don’t care,” I said to Rina, and this pretty much summed up everything I’d been feeling in the last week. I’d begun to wonder if I really had dreamed everything that had happened with Rogerson. That whole Friday before seemed unreal now. And it could have been, except for the fallout I was suffering for rejecting Mike Evans. Rina had only been upset with me for about five minutes, but Mike had been alternately glaring or sulking at me all week. Not that I cared that much, being that I was doing much of the same, feeling cheap and lost and unable to forget kissing Rogerson for all that time in his car, even as I tried to.
    We finished our number and got a pattering of polite applause as we ran off the stage, yelling and high-kicking. A man with a beard, barefoot and carrying a pillow, took the stage after us.
    I could see Stewart and Boo in the back of the room. They were teaching an art workshop involving fruit and personal experience in another part of the building. My mother was there too, with the Junior League, assembling snacks and punch in the back kitchen. She’d been so preoccupied catching every airing of the Lamont Whipper Show— which was on daily at eleven, three, and ten at night on various channels—she hadn’t even noticed anything different about me this last week. She’d only seen Cass on one more show, but still she sat through all the catfights and cussing, waiting for another glimpse.
    â€œHello, everyone,” the man with the beard and pillow said softly into the microphone. “My name is Wade, and I want everyone to take a deep, cleansing breath, because for the next half hour, we’re all going to get a little closer to ourselves.”
    After Melinda, the knitting woman in the front row had obviously had enough of anyone getting close to themselves. She picked up her bag and her booties, and wheeled her oxygen tank right on out of there.
    Wade, at the microphone, didn’t seem to notice. “I’m an artist, a writer, a dancer, and a survivor, and I want to show you even the smallest movement can spur happiness and healing.”
    â€œOh, Jesus,” Rina said in a flat voice, reaching up to adjust her bra strap. “I’m going outside for a cigarette.”
    â€œI’m right behind you,” Eliza Drake said, pulling her pack out of her purse.
    â€œYou coming?” Rina asked me.
    â€œIn a minute,” I said. Onstage, Wade had taken his pillow and sat down, folding his legs in the position I recognized from Boo’s biweekly garden meditation. The crowd was thinning out, slowly, chairs rattling as people headed back to the snack area, where I could see my mother pouring punch into little blue cups.
    â€œNow, the first thing I want everyone to do,” Wade was saying into the microphone, “is to take a breath and hold your arms over your head, like this.”
    I watched as a few senior citizens followed his lead: Boo and